"That truth should be silent I had almost forgot"--Enobarbus in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, back in Rome after having been too long in Egypt.---------
Melville's PIERRE, Book 4, chapter 5: "Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing."

About Me

Hershel Parker is the author of the 1997 Pulitzer finalist, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins, 1996) and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins, 2002). Each volume won the top award from the Association of American Publishers. Parker’s 1984 Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction brought biographical evidence to bear on textual theory, literary criticism, and literary theory. Parker and the team of now mature Hayford students are finishing the final volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition. Robert Sandberg is helping with the layout and design of three print volumes of The New Melville Log. Parker in late 2013 is at work on Ornery People: What Was a Depression Okie?, a book about his white and red American ancestors. Parker's Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative was put on the NEW YORKER blog as one of the Books to Watch Out for in January ("Parker writes with a rare combination of humor and passion"). On 30-31 March 2013 the WALL STREET JOURNAL gave a page and a third to Carl Rollyson's review of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY as "a superb contribution to a fledgling field: the study of the writing of literary lives."